


Delilah

by MaryPSue



Series: Grauntie Ford [6]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, lots of fluff and family bonding, past emotional abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 03:23:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8873845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Ford wears her hair short for the next thirty years. Shaved close for lice or prison regulations or cranial surgery, correcting the clumsy, slipshod job she’d done inserting the metal plate, strengthening its protections until Ford almost believes she can trust her own actions again, trust her own mind again. Cut rough with a single blade, during a few stolen moments of rest. Memorably, in one dimension, with a map of the Citadel where one of Bill’s puppets is lurking shaved into it.(Bill used to love - or at least act like he loved - playing with her hair.)...or, in which weakness - and strength - can come from the most surprising of places.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So this is also not the final plotty installment in the Grauntie Ford AU series - it is, instead, a short ficlet that got a little out of hand. I borrowed and slightly repurposed a few ideas (the second-to-last and the last scene, especially) and lines of Dipper’s dialogue from [angelsarenamederika](angelsarenamederika.tumblr.com) for this ficlet - I hope I’ve done them justice.
> 
> Like in Mirrored, this one starts out using he/him pronouns for mtf Ford in flashback - if that’s going to bother you, this might not be the fic for you. Emotional abuse is also alluded to, but don’t worry - this is like at least 50% fluff and Family Bonding™.

_I never met a more impossible girl…_

…

He starts to grow his hair out in second year. 

It takes a year, a year of rooming with Fiddleford, a year of playing DD&MD with Fiddleford and his hippie friends, a year of living with the kind of weirdos who’d actually chosen to go to Backupsmore, and to be totally truthful it’s more because he’s much too busy to get to the barber than anything else, but one day Ford is combing out his hair after a shower and realises it’s long enough to pull into a ponytail. A very short ponytail, to be sure, but a ponytail nonetheless.

He’s not sure why, but the sight of it curling around his ears gives Ford a little thrill of pride. Perhaps because it’s evidence, like his sleepless nights and the lightheadedness brought on by too much caffeine, of how hard he’s working. Perhaps because he can imagine how unimpressed his father would be. The thought of his father’s disapproving face sends a sick lurch through him, though, and he turns his thoughts elsewhere.

Fiddleford looks up, absentmindedly, as Ford steps back into the dorm room they share, then does a double-take. “That’s cu- new,” he says, to Ford’s ponytail. “New,” he repeats, adjusting his glasses without taking his eyes from the point somewhere around the nape of Ford’s neck. “Good lookin’ on ya, but I’m not so sure it pairs all that well with the sweatervest.”

Ford’s ears burn. He pulls the ponytail out of his hair, muttering something about showers and practicality that doesn’t even make sense to him.

He doesn’t cut it, though.

…

One of Fiddleford’s friends points it out, a few weeks later, at their weekly DD&MD gathering. “You’ve been holding out on us, Pines,” the… boy? girl? Individual Ford only knows as PJ says, from under their own curtain of long, straight hair, only the tip of their nose protruding from beneath the mane signaling to Ford that they’re facing him. “Who knew you were secretly cool?” They lean over, tug at one of the curls that’s started to turn into a little ringlet just behind his right ear, and Ford jerks away. “You got a full-on baby mullet going here, man.”

“I’ve been busy,” Ford says, frostily. PJ shrugs, leaning back into their chair. 

“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

The campaign takes them, tonight, through the Haunted Wastes of Aden, once a lush and fruitful valley, now a giant, open grave for the fallen warriors of a recent, vicious, and utterly pointless battle. Ford’s half-elf ranger takes the opportunity to scavenge a piece of choice dwarven plate mail from a corpse, and is rewarded with a groan from across the table.

“I don’t get you, Pines,” Terry complains, ignoring the glare Farrah aims in his direction. “Playing a hot elf chick, sure. Covering her up with heavy armour all the time? Now that’s weird.”

“Astra is imaginary, Terry,” Ford answers, scanning the map. “If it bothers you so much, picture her in a mithril bikini. I prefer to keep her alive and mostly uninjured.”

“That’s what you dump your stats into defensive spellwork for! What’s the point of this game if it doesn’t have hot elf chicks in bikinis?”

“I understand,” Farrah interrupts, looking at Ford like he’s just told her he knows the secret of immortality and she’s surprised to no longer be the only one. “They’re not imaginary at all. They exist, just in a dimension parallel to this one. Their lives are in our hands. Their hearts and our hearts are one.” She meets Ford’s eyes and holds his gaze for an uncomfortable stretch of time, and Ford is forcibly reminded that she’s playing a necromancer who is heavily implied to eat corpses to steal their knowledge and abilities.

“Yeah, that’s not how the infinite multiverse works,” the DM butts in. “Astra, turns out your new armour’s cursed. You’ve just summoned up a horde of orc ghosts intent on killing whoever stole it.”

“Told you to stick to bikinis,” Terry mutters, before yelling, “I cast fireball!”

…

Summer comes. Ford’s mother welcomes him home with an enormous hug, and a pinched frown as she tugs at his hair. Ford’s father welcomes him home with just the frown. “Better call the barber, Sheila,” he says, and then, to Ford, “Hope those damn hippies haven’t been putting ideas in your head.”

Ford’s unpacking his suitcase for bed before he realises his father hadn’t so much as said hello.

He goes back to school freshly shorn, the sea air unfamiliar and cold on the back of his neck.

…

It takes a few months for his hair to grow out to the length it was before. Ford tries not to think about it, to pay it no mind like he had last time, but he can’t ignore the twisting knowledge that this is now something he’s chosen to do, willingly, deliberately, against his parents’ wishes. He doesn’t know what that means. But it feels like it means something.

By the end of the winter semester, Ford’s hair grazes his shoulders. He tries pulling it back into a ponytail, again, one day when he’s alone in his room and knows that if he copies out one more diagram he’s going to snap and light all of his carefully colour-coded notes on fire. For no reason at all, he thinks of Astra, of a life hardened by living on one’s wits and the strength of one’s own arms, of the open air and the castles and the monsters of the Nine Realms, of a very different kind of life than his own. 

He likes it, Ford decides, listening to the footsteps in the hall outside to make sure Fiddleford isn’t about to burst in before he steps cautiously over to the mirror. Likes the way the ponytail falls, a few escaping curls framing his face. Likes the slightly roguish air it lends to him, despite the sweatervest. Something about it even makes him feel - a little braver, a little stronger, like maybe one day he actually could be, could become, somebody like Astra.

An adventurer. Of course he means an adventurer. Ford yanks the ponytail out so roughly that it stings his scalp, and turns his back on the mirror, storming over to his flimsy particleboard desk and flinging himself down in his creaking folding chair. He rounds on his notes again with a spiteful viciousness even he doesn’t understand.

…

Summer comes. Ford gets an internship with the bio lab and doesn’t go home at all.

…

He gets his hair cut before graduation, already feeling the weight of his father’s disapproving gaze. Ford’s not certain his father will even be there, whether his parents will bother with the expense and fuss of closing the pawn shop and coming all the way out to the west coast just for a few hours of ceremony, but…well, hope springs eternal.

He goes to the beauty school, in the basement, because it’s a third the price of the barbershop and only half the people he’s known to go there have come back with bald patches (and, knowing Backupsmore’s student body, it’s likely that at least some of them had wanted it that way). He only realises after he sits down in the chair that the rest of the salon is full of girls getting their hair coiffed and curled for graduation.

The stylist glances over in the direction Ford’s looking, and smiles. “Want something like that?” He says it like he’s joking, but he doesn’t laugh, turning a patient smile on Ford like he’s waiting for a real answer. 

Ford isn’t quite sure how to respond, so he says nothing.

“You’ve almost got enough length for it,” the stylist continues, musing, running a hand through the locks at the nape of Ford’s neck. “We could do some pincurls…”

Ford catches himself, shakes his head. “Just trim it short.”

The stylist shrugs, and picks up his razor.

…

Ford’s father doesn’t come to the ceremony, after all.

…

The less said about Gravity Falls, the better. It hurts too much to remember, how bright everything had seemed, how rich with possibility. How much Ford had allowed hims- herself to hope.

How little that hope had mattered, in the end.

…

( _there is a night, one of the more bitter nights of an already-bitter winter, at the trailing end of a week of cutting silence from Bill (though Ford does not know it is so near the end, at the time, half-fears and worries that she half-hopes it will be forever), when Fiddleford breaks out his ma’s apple cider and Ford, with a shining new/old truth burning in the centre of her chest and made brave by a pleasant warm haze of nostalgia and alcohol -_

_but it’s lost, like so many other memories burned like painful photographs, like so many other nights from those bitterbright years_

_and inside of a year neither Ford nor Fiddleford remember)_

…

The first time she gets her hands on a blade on the other side of the portal, Ford hacks off the mane that’s started to make a nuisance of itself. Well, first she hacks the pirate she stole the blade from to pieces, but -  trivialities.

(She will leave that part of the story out when she tells it, later, to Dipper and Mabel. It will be a long night of drinking before she will, haltingly, tell Stanley the truth. Adventures are not nearly so glamorous as they had seemed when they took place in the Nine Realms, safely in the world of fiction. Adventures are not nearly so wonderful as they had seemed at age eleven, with the ocean spreading out from her - his - the twins’ feet and the whole world on the other side.)

Ford wears her hair short for the next thirty years. Shaved close for lice or prison regulations or cranial surgery, correcting the clumsy, slipshod job she’d done inserting the metal plate, strengthening its protections until Ford almost believes she can trust her own actions again, trust her own mind again. Cut rough with a single blade, during a few stolen moments of rest. Memorably, in one dimension, with a map of the Citadel where one of Bill’s puppets is lurking shaved into it.

(Bill used to love - or at least act like he loved - playing with her hair.)

There are perfectly good, practical reasons for it, of course. Astra’s flowing locks would never suit a  _real_  adventurer, providing an easy handle for a foe in a fight, an easy trap to step into if entangled with trees or brush or architecture, presenting a lab safety hazard - the list goes on. And Ford doesn’t have space in her life for those kind of frivolities, self-indulgences, not when she’s a wanted fugitive lost in the infinite multiverse. Not when she’s locked in a deadly struggle with a demon hell-bent on the devastation of her world, a demon who had coaxed this budding sense of self within her into bloom, a demon to whom she’d willingly handed the key to the destruction of everything that had ever mattered to her.

(He also used to love to tell her what an easy, obvious target for hate and scorn growing it out made her, what an uncommonly good  _friend_  he was for sticking with her regardless.)

She tells herself she doesn’t miss her hair, that she doesn’t miss any of it, that she’s fine, she’s a survivor.

Eventually she even begins to believe herself.

…

Dipper - ‘confesses’ is the wrong word, heavy with connotations of guilt, but Ford, for all her immense vocabulary, can’t seem to bring a better word to mind - after the fight with Probabilitor the Annoying, after the dust has settled and the season finale of Ducktective (whatever that is) has been watched (and watched again on the eleven o'clock airing). The words he uses sound rushed and awkward, but Ford gets no sense that it’s because he’s - ashamed, or embarrassed, or afraid of a bad reaction, more that it’s something he hasn’t had a chance, or perhaps a reason, to tell many people.

“I was born a girl,” he says, and then, quick, “I just, I just - thought. I wanted you to know.”

His trust is a gift. 

With her old fantasy pastime so close to the top of her mind, it’s almost natural that Ford ends up telling Dipper about Astra, about university, about the inklings that first opened her up to doubt - to the possibility. Opened her up to Bill, she thinks, but doesn’t say, wanting anything but to shatter the look of mingled awe and pride and disbelief Dipper’s aiming in her direction.

“You really didn’t know until then? I mean, I’m not trying to question you, or say you aren’t -” Dipper grabs his hat with both hands, just above his ears, tugging it down as though the stiff material will stretch enough to cover them. “Ohhhh man, I am definitely messing this up.”

Ford reaches out, resting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right,” she says, in as reassuring a tone as she can manage. Dipper unwinds slightly, though that only means he is drawn tight as a violin string, rather than a bowstring. “It’s just fine, Dipper." 

"Sorry, I just - I can’t imagine not, not  _knowing_.” Dipper shrugs, holding out both hands palm-up, like he’s trying to hold something that keeps running through his fingers. “I’ve always been a boy, I just -” He huffs out a self-deprecating half-laugh. “Don’t always look it…or sound like it…”

“Nonsense. After what you did today? I don’t see how anyone could doubt your manliness.” The smile Dipper flashes up at Ford is so earnest, so fragile, that Ford has to look away as she says, “But your parents still believe you’ll grow out of it?" 

When Dipper shrugs one shoulder, halfheartedly, and turns his gaze back towards his feet, Ford has to fight back the sudden urge to storm upstairs, regardless of the hour, regardless of whether she’s even supposed to still exist in this dimension, to get on the telephone and give Shermie’s son and his wife a piece of her mind. Instead, she gives Dipper’s shoulder a squeeze and, when he finally looks back up at her, a smile that she hopes is reassuring. "Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that. Perhaps they’ll know sense when they hear it from a doctor.”

“You have a doctorate, it’s not the same thing,” Dipper says, but he’s smiling. 

Ford feigns hurt. “I have  _twelve_  doctorates, thank you for asking!”

She counts the soft snort of laughter that Dipper tries to smother as a victory.

“I dunno, maybe they’ve got a point,” he sighs, after a moment. “I mean, what if I do grow out of it? What if it really is just a phase and I end up doing something I’m just gonna regret? Like, I know I’m smart! And very mature for my age! But you’re the smartest person I know, and if you’re still struggling with this stuff…”

“Dipper,” Ford says, gripped by a sudden sense of urgency, “listen to me.” She waits until Dipper looks up again, catching and holding his gaze as she attempts to collect the thoughts that her alarm at Dipper’s words had scattered.

“Do you know why they still call a scientific theory a 'theory’, even after it’s all but proven?” Ford asks, at last, and Dipper half-nods, like he’s not sure where she’s trying to lead him but he’s willing to follow.

“Because they’ve tested it thoroughly and they haven’t found anything that proves it isn’t true, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t change with new information?”

“Exactly! Well done, my boy, you have a better understanding of the scientific process than many grown adults I’ve known.” Ford clears her throat, trying to remind herself to stay on track, though the way Dipper is beaming at her makes it very difficult to think about anything other than how terrifyingly lucky she is to be here to be able to meet him, and his sister. “You and I, my boy - we’re theories. There’s no way to conclusively, objectively 'prove’ something you can only feel for yourself.” She leans forward just enough to rest what she hopes is a comforting hand on Dipper’s shoulder. “And perhaps someday, you’ll encounter new evidence or a new dilemma that will change everything you understand. But until then, we don’t just stop doing science because we don’t have an absolute, indelible certainty to work from! We don’t stop exploring and creating, we don’t stop growing and changing. We start from what we do know." 

Dipper bites his bottom lip, rubs the elbow of one arm with the opposite hand. Ford gives his shoulder a soft squeeze, and says, "And we do amazing things that way.”

The smile Dipper puts on is a little twisted by the way he’s still biting his bottom lip, and still pointed at the floor, but it is a smile nonetheless.

Ford gives his shoulder a pat, then sits back. “Do you want to go raid the leftover snacks? I’m certain Stanley can’t have eaten  _all_  of the mountain of junk I saw in the kitchen.”

Dipper raises his head to look at Ford, his smile growing. “Well, I dunno about Grunkle Stan, but you’d be amazed what Mabel can put in her stomach.”

“Actually, I don’t believe I would,” Ford says. “Do you know, the other day I asked her to open her mouth and she burped glitter all over my face?”

“Yup, sounds like Mabel,” Dipper says, pushing himself to his feet.

He pauses a moment, once they’re both on their feet, fidgeting with the hem of his vest like there’s still something more he wants to say. It takes Ford a few moments to notice he’s hanging back, but when she does, she wastes no time in asking, “Is something the matter?”

“No, I just -” Dipper takes a deep breath, shoots Ford a smile that is small but genuine. “Thanks.”

Ford smiles back.

…

The world ends.

(It’s another story, for another time.)

…

There’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done to make the Shack ready to host Dipper and Mabel’s birthday party, not only the decorating that Mabel had effortlessly and enthusiastically taken charge of or the logistics of attendance and activities and food and drink that Dipper has been stewing over, but shoring up the structural integrity of the Shack itself to ensure it doesn’t collapse on the guests’ heads.

(Ford will never forget the sight of it, emerging from the trees, caved in on itself from its fall and looking for all the world as though it had stood empty and abandoned these last thirty years.)

She’s in the middle of trying to convince Dan Corduroy (who has apparently, at some point during her absence, earned the moniker of 'Manly’, a fact which absolutely does not surprise Ford in the slightest) not to punch out the triangular window in the attic, because she wants to do the honours herself, when she notices, through said window, Mabel curled up on the stripped attic bed with both arms around her pig. The sight is striking, especially considering that the last time Ford had seen Mabel, Mabel had been running into the house leading her two friends and yelling about confetti cannons. To see her low, now, today, is as wrong as seeing a - a sheep on the plains of Lobelian VII.

Mabel doesn’t look up when Ford smashes through the window, gesturing for Dan to give them some privacy. She just buries her face in the rolls of fat on the pig’s - Waddles’ - neck. “Mabel’s annexing Sweater Town to Pig City. She is not taking callers today.”

“What happened to decorating?” Ford asks. Mabel doesn’t answer.

Ford waits, but Mabel doesn’t uncurl, doesn’t speak. Eventually, Ford settles cautiously on the other bed’s bare mattress, across the room.

She waits.

“I’m going to have Dan replace that window with a circle,” she says, at last, when listening to the pig snort in its sleep is starting to get to her. “Or possibly a dodecahedron.”

There’s a soft sound from Mabel that might have conveyed any emotion at all.

Finally, Mabel speaks, though her voice is muffled from still being pressed against the pig. “I’m sorry I ditched the decorating committee.”

“I assure you, the decorating committee is making enormous progress in your absence,” Ford says. The words are out before she can reel them back, realising too late how they’d fall on Mabel’s ears. “They’ve made real strides towards realising your vision, but I’m certain they won’t be able to complete it without the visionary herself,” she amends, cautiously, and is rewarded by the sight of Mabel turning her head so that her face is visible, her ear now pressed against the pig’s neck and her hair draping over its head like a wig.

“Grunkle Stan started bragging about the presents he got us and I feel like such a jerk,” Mabel blurts, and Ford, caution increased by her earlier poorly-considered comment, doesn’t respond. “I shouldn’t be getting awesome presents, I shouldn’t have this huge party thrown for me - I just caused the apocalypse!”

Apparently oblivious to the effect her words have had on Ford, Mabel takes a huge breath in, lifting her torso up like a mermaid breaching against a rock, then blows it all out in an enormous raspberry, flopping back facedown on her pig.

“Who told you that,” Ford demands, a hand already resting on the hilt of the blaster just inside her coat. She hadn’t even realised she’d moved. 

“Nobody,” Mabel groans, from under the curtain of her hair. “Nobody had to, okay? I got it when the unicorn said it, even if she was a lying liar meanyface, she wasn’t wrong. I’ve been really selfish, even when I was trying to be good I was just doing it so people would think I was nice, and I ruined Dipper’s one chance at getting everything he ever wanted, and, and, I should’ve stayed in the bubble -”

Her words dissolve. Ford realises, with horror, that the soft sounds now emanating from under Mabel’s blanket of hair are the sounds of crying. 

Ford has no idea what to do with a crying twelve- no, thirteen-year-old. Hell, she barely knows what to do with a crying adult. Sitting on the opposite bed watching feels like the wrong response, but she hesitates, hovering over Mabel, trying to decide whether a pat on the shoulder would be comforting or just awkward.

It can’t possibly be more awkward than the hovering, she decides, and reaches down to give Mabel’s back a pat. As soon as her hand lands on Mabel’s shoulder, though, Mabel’s shoulders start to shake harder, and full-on sobs erupt from under her hair.

“It’s all right,” Ford blurts, alarmed, crouching down to put her face closer to Mabel’s. “It’s all right, it’s over, no one got hurt - Mabel, no one in their right mind would blame you for what happened. But it’s over. We’re safe now. You can put it behind you.”

Mabel turns to look at her, and Ford hasn’t seen contempt like that on another face since - since the last summer she went home to Glass Shard Beach.

“What, like  _you_  did?” Mabel says, her voice like acid, and almost instantly claps a hand over her mouth, shooting bolt upright. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t mean - what is  _wrong_  with me? I used to be so nice and sweet and now I’m just a jerk who says mean things to people I care about!" 

She flops back onto the pig with a groan that sounds like it’s being dragged out of her lower intestine, and lies there, the picture of perfect misery.

"I…think it’s called 'being a teenager’,” Ford hazards, and is rewarded with the absolute smallest of chuckles from behind Mabel’s arms. “Mabel - what did you mean when you said…?”

Mabel shrugs.

“Why didn’t you ever grow your hair back out?” she asks, instead of answering the question.

Ford takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly. 

“Stanley had the mullet, not me,” she tries to joke. “I never -”

Mabel pushes herself up on one elbow. “Mr. McGucket said you did. In college.”

“Mr. McGucket’s memory is unreliable,” Ford says, and is proud of how level her voice stays.

The look Mabel gives her reminds Ford why she always used to leave the excuses to Stanley.

“You spent thirty years not growing out your hair and you haven’t been wearing the new clothes we got you and I _know_ you said it’s because you don’t want to wreck them and it could be dangerous or impractical and stuff but - and it’s not like you don’t want it to be different, I saw you in Bill’s perfect dream-world -” Mabel looks away, eyes turning down and away from her pig. “If you don’t even deserve to be _you_ because you messed up and got tricked by Bill, then how can I deserve a party?”

Ford can’t speak for a few, long, moments, can’t even order words in her head.

“I made…a lot of mistakes, regarding Bill,” she says, at last. “I never considered that this might be one of them.”

She looks at Mabel, bright, cheerful, ray of sunshine Mabel crying on her own birthday, and says, “Perhaps the worst one of all.”

…

Mabel eventually comes downstairs, though she sits curled up with Waddles and gives directions to her decorating team for a while rather than diving right back in herself.

Ford makes a detour to stop in her room - the one she’s barely set foot in since she arrived - before heading down after Mabel. The next time they see each other, Mabel takes in the sight of the coat Pacifica had picked out, the one that had made Ford feel almost shamefully…pretty, and the sweater with its 'World’s #1 Great-Aunt!’ message, and runs up to wrap both arms around Ford’s waist, smiling an enormous Mabel smile that only peels to sadness a little at the edges.

It takes about five minutes of party preparation before Ford’s finery is covered in frosting, but then Mabel runs by laughing and firing what looks like a modified hand-held confetti gun at her brother, who is struggling to get his own to launch, and Ford finds she doesn’t mind at all.

…

The sun is brilliant, blinding, the sky a blue so blue it’s almost black at the very centre. The sea is calm and cold, the occasional little waves hitting just right against the prow and making it echo like a drum. The rigging creaks like old bones overhead.

The internet connection is crap.

“I tried to use Fiddleford’s signal amplifier, but it grew legs, scuttled out abovedecks, and last I saw it, was picking a fight with a crab,” Ford apologises, to the twins on the other side of the video call. The image is blotchy with low resolution and moves more like poorly-made stop-motion animation than living beings, with long interruptions where the image will freeze but the voices continue, but neither Ford nor Stan are willing to hang up.

“Like some people I could name,” Stan interjects, and Ford scowls in his direction. 

“It was bigger than our boat and trying to crack open our hull, Stanley, and if I recall correctly, you were the one who suggested we 'make it run crying for its weird crustacean mommy’.”

Dipper and Mabel’s laughter, at least, comes through loud and clear.

“Ooh, Grauntie Ford, I love your braid!” Mabel squeaks, as the video suddenly (and, sadly, temporarily) clears. “Do a twirl, gimme a better look!”

Ford’s ears burn, but she obliges, showing off the crown of careful braid wrapped all the way around her head. Mabel claps in delight. "You look so pretty! Did you do it yourself?“

Ford is about to answer, but Stanley clears his throat theatrically, puffing out his chest and pointing at it with one thumb. "You’re lookin’ at the  _artiste_  right here.”

“My technical ability is still…limited,” Ford admits, grudgingly, and Stan lets out a burst of good-natured laughter, clapping her on the back with enough force to potentially dislocate a rib.

“Ah, Sixer’s just sore I’m finally better'n her at something other than boxing.”

“Oh, this wouldn’t be the first time,” Ford mutters, and Stan’s eyebrows shoot up.

“What, you’re actually admittin’ I’m better at stuff?”

Ford looks heavenward as innocently as she can manage. “I do seem to recall someone taking great pride in his victory in a belching competition…”

“Hey, don’t act like you weren’t the other contestant,” Stan says, and he’s smiling.

“Grunkle Stan, Grauntie Ford,  _ew_ ,” Dipper says, but Mabel leans close to the camera, holding a hand up to shield her mouth as she stage-whispers.

“Teach me your secrets, Grunkle Stan. Be my burping sensei.”

“When we get back, kiddo,” Stan answers in a stage-whisper of his own. “Can’t have these two nerds listenin’ in.”

“Hey!” Dipper protests, from somewhere behind the blotchy dark-pink blur that is Mabel’s face. Ford just laughs.

The rift is closed. Bill is gone, and the sun shining off the water is so bright it almost hurts her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> The lyric at the beginning of the fic is from the Dresden Dolls' _Delilah_.


End file.
